I'll be in Barcelona (Spain) and thus unable to post from 2-4 Oct. If you live in the area and want me to say hi, just let me know.

Druid

My Druid is currently level 62, and now starting outlands. Replacing every bit of gear he's got and his health has already nearly doubled. Outland quest rewards are so funny. At least the gear changeover in WotLK will be slightly less. Well, sorta anyway.

Poll end

Closing one poll that ended a few days ago. Looks like wow players go hand in hand with altitis ;)

2-3 : 247 (46%)

4-5 : 121 (22%)

Just my main : 107 (20%)

6-7 : 23 (4%)

None :( : 17 (3%)

8+ : 16 (3%)

I'm currently listening to Di.fmWhat sort of music do you listen to while playing wow?

I'm sure you've been following the updates as well, build 8982 currently on the beta servers.

The combat tree still sucks, assassination got some nerfs from the original version. However, there's some good news. Blue post: We're looking into pumping the damage up in Combat, still

Time will tell. Perhaps 5% agi added to lightning reflexes? Which is a junk talent in it's current place and form.

All your honor belongs to blizzard

As soon as 3.0.3 hits, your honor will be gone! (note I wrote 3.0.3 and not 3.0.2)Your arena points as well. So yeah, that's the first patch after the WotLK patch which should arrive sometime next month. ETA of your honor being deleted : ~12-13 november 2008.

No, you don't have to believe me, but that's what the Big Bad Blues have announced. They're adding 4 new trinkets and 4 cloaks to spend your points on quickly, or even some gems which could then be traded off:All of the gems that can be purchased with honor will have the Bind on Pickup and Unique-Equipped tags removed so multiples of them can be equipped and they can be traded (or auctioned).

So, if you're one of the many players foolish enough to have gathered 75K honor in "preparation for WotLK", then you're pretty much screwed. You can always buy some nice black colored mounts in preparation of the new mount achievement.

More reading material

Hey, I got to keep you busy somehow right?!If you enjoyed the links in the previous post then you should enjoy these as well.

Whether because of players not releasing and running back fast enough, tanks going afk, people not buffing, nobody having read a boss' strategy, people showing up with pvp spec, whatever. There will be times you got a few minutes to kill during the raid. Obviously you could start a long discussion on TeamSpeak about the meaning of life.... turn up the music, or.. well plenty of options really.

What do you usually do if you end up with a spare moment like that?

Some may remember the Bored in KZ post from earlier this year. You could play bingo! Obviously the chart could be modified to work for BT or Sunwell just as easily. And the big list of wow and other comics hasn't stopped growing either.

Supposedly the guys from popcap games (which appears to be on a blacklist on my peerguardian) are going to release a wow addon soon for a classic game called Bejewelled. Source: Wow Insider. Personally I hate bejewelled, never been any good at it, and doubt I ever will be. But, I'd keep still keep an eye on that. If it turns out they like making wow addon games, they might well start releasing more in the near future.

Dragon Tavern

It's a text based browser RPG, it was running an advert on the site so I figured I'd check it out. It's not half bad once you figure out how it works. There's a big long FAQ you can check out if you're confused. Maximum number of characters you can make it 20. Stay alive, and once you get enough points be sure to get yourself a "banner of exploration". If you're going to play around with it, be sure to join the competition group I made called: "Random Ravings". You'll be able to check your own progress vs some of my characters.

Comic Highlights

I realize I haven't given you a lot of comic links lately, but there's many many in my bookmarks. So let's see. Not sure if I've listed some of these before, but they're all pretty awesome so there's no harm in listing them again. Be sure to check em out.

WotLK beta is still getting frequent updates. Inscription is aparently getting some craftable BoP shoulder enchants. MMOC also posted some screenshots of the new mounts mentioned earlier. Be sure to especially check out the Proto-Drakes, they look damn awesome. There's also a pic of the Albino drake which doesn't look very albino-ish imho.

Blizzard even managed to slip in some rogue updates again, Gouge awards one combo point once again.... go figure. The combat tree is looking a bit better than last week. Vitality is changed to improve your energy regeneration by 10%, Agression was moved to Tier 5 and changed to 5 points which give a total of 10% dmg to your evisc, sinister strike and backstab. Some decent changes, but the main griefances still stand. Combat tier 4 stinks, and relentless strikes is still 5 points in the subtlety tree.

So, you were looking for a gold sink? Ha! Ok, here's one 15k gold for a mount. It carries up to 3-4 people and some vendors aparently. Worth 15K? You decide.

Also interesting are the following achievements:

Leading the Cavalry - Obtain 75 mounts. Reward - Albino Drake

For The Horde! / Alliance! - Slay the leaders of the other faction. Reward - Black War Bear

You see that first one? "Leading the Cavalry". How would you like to be the first person on your server with that mount? That's impossible right? Maybe not, 75 mounts is quite possible, perhaps not feasible but certainly possible. Once the expansion hits it'll be easier though.

A word of warning however, this is expensive stuff. Also, if you're a tauren you are at a severe disadvantage. Yeh, go cry in a corner hornboy, you won't be the first on your server with this here dragon. Nothing you can do about it except re-roll.

Gold sink? Pretty much. Why else would anyone buy a boat load of mounts if you can only use a single one at a time anyway? The new WotLK mounts have a pretty heavy pricetag as well. 15k for the mammoth, 700g for some of the others. Some are free as different achievement rewards though.

The goal

So, we need 75 mounts. Crazy I know, but like the mini pets all mounts are being made into "spells" of a sort and they will no longer take up inventory space. They still do right now though. Lets have a look at WarcraftMounts, a site which has a fairly good list of all the mounts currently in the game.

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Once you have purchased the Blizzard Authenticator you can login to World of Warcraft Account Management to attach the token to your account.

Quote: The attunement requirements for Onyxia's Lair have been lifted. The Alliance quests had to be removed due to King Wrynn's return. As I said in the quest forum, we'll try and come back to this one and adjust the questline to work with the current timeline. That won't happen for launch.

A shame in a way, the most "difficult" attunement still in the game being removed. But, it's got a positive side as well, you can drag your alts trough there for some quick loot now. I presume this will become a "feat of strength". (Achievement)

The first part of the patch is already active on the background downloader, and measures a hefty ~800MB So, be sure to have your way with the wowwiki Patch mirrors in case the regular downloader isn't behaving the way it should. (As it tends to)

I've been working on the druid this week. Currently at lvl 54 and finishing the last few green quests in Searing Gorge. You can never have enough alts!That's him right there. Ugly ass armor, so I make sure he's in catform as much as possible.

Still on the planning

Some stuff that may show up on the blog sooner or later, suggestions are always welcome, but these things quite simply don't write themselves.

Fortunately it won't work for "all" items. That'd be pretty pointless if that were the case. What am I talking about? Oh right, well the thing is.... Blizzard is adding a new "type" of item in WotLK. "Binds on Account". They'll be available for the next kind of heroic badges. Emblem of Heroism to be exact.

I kid you not, Gold colored text as was expected to be the artifact level item or such. But it seems that color is being used for account bound items now. Red will be artifact level. (Perhaps Frostmourne?)

You can find a list of some more items over at MMOC. The list is small still, but it appears there'll be plenty to spend your emblems on.

It's quite simple really, it's a reach out from blizzard to all the QQ and whiney kids who complain about having to level from 1-70 all over again after already owning 2-8 max level characters. Aside of lowering the required XP from 60-70 by 30% they're adding these items. The shoulders as you can see will increase your XP gain from killing monsters by an additional 10%. It's not certain yet whether the other armor pieces will also gain your XP gains, but I highly doubt that.

The items are only available if you have a level 80 character. So blizzard still wants you to go out there and play the game to get them. The items are weak. Very weak even, and appear to be itemized in such a way to scale in much the same way as an equal level blue item would. Just look at the weapons. A lvl 80 blue sword would have 120.0 DPS, just like the BtA dagger would if you were level 80. The blue would have better stats though.

Obviously, this also means these items are a lot weaker than the level 80 epic badge gear would be. So you're not likely to buy any unless you're:A: Planning to rerollB: Already equipped in the best of the best and have nothing else to spend your badges on.C: Are plain retarded.

What's the point?

As stated, it's a reach out from blizzard to help players level new characters faster. 10% extra XP, and always a good piece of armor and weapon at hand without having to worry too much about trying to find a group for uldaman, gnomeregan, scholomance, blackrock depths, etc, etc.

It's a great badge sink. See "B" a bit higher.

It also helps to urge some familiar altoholics to go and level at least "one" character all the way to 80 so you can farm badges to equip your alts with.

It urges players who normally can't be bothered to make alts, to start collecting gear for an alt, and perhaps even level it. This should help reduce the low number of tanks or healers at the high end of the game. In theory anyway.

It helps level the playfield at the twink stage. Anyone can get "good" items for their low level alts now without too much effort. Low level battle grounds would no longer be a complete massacre of blue geared chars vs green geared chars. Or perhaps more so...

What can you do?

Blizzard has responded on the finding of these items and confirmed what we know about them.

Mail them between your own characters on the same account. Finished making a shadow priest? Make a mage or warlock by re-using the same gear! Done with a paladin? Then you can make a Death knight or warrior just as easily.

Use them on a level 1 character and keep using them all the way to level 80, the stats will scale as you gain levels.

Use low level enchants on them.

What can you NOT do?

The itemlevel is marked as iLvl "1". That means that for any and all enchanting purposes these items can not be enchanted with anything but the most basic enchants that were available before TBC. e.g. lifestealing, fiery weapon, +4 to all stats on chest, 7 stamina on boots, stuff like that.

Mail the item to characters that are not on your account.

Put the item on the auction house.

Disenchant the item. Nope sorry, no easy shards.

What is still uncertain?

WotLK Also has some other new enchant type professions. A familiar example will be the ring enchants, these bound an item to your character. In the expansion there's wrist and leg enchants for leatherworkers, leg and cloak enchants for tailors, glove and feet enchants for engineers and even sockets on your chest, belt and gloves by blacksmiths. Those new enchants all cause the item to be bound to your character. How these will affect the new Bind to Account items is not certain yet. However, as it's not possible to use high level enchants on low level items, it's fairly safe to assume that you'll be unable to use any of the WotLK profession specific enchants on these items.

Another uncertainty, is how these items will be affected by character transfers. It seems logical that the items will remain with the character and be bound to the account that they arrive on. Yes it's possible to transfer a character from one account to another. Costs you a bit though.

Repair cost, will it scale too? Obviously having to repair an item worth 30g will be a bit much for your poor frequently dying alt. Having a repair cost of only 3 silver would be rather unfair to your level 80 character though. Can you mail the item if it's not repaired?

Some classes get a new type of armor when they reach level 40. Shamans, Paladins, Hunters, Warriors. Initiallyl they may use leather or mail, and then learn to use mail or plate when they reach 40. Would these armor pieces change from leather to mail automatically? It seems very unlikely.Update: They do in fact upgrade. See this image or blizzard's confirmation.

So...

What do you think, good idea, bad idea? Personally I think the items should be toned down and scale like they were green items instead of blue items. Opinions may vary though.

Core hounds!

High on many a hunter's wish list since Molten Core was first released. Sadly we couldn't tame them as they were above our own level. When TBC came around a good few hunters tried and found they were marked as non-tameable.

However, WotLK is going to change this.

A new talent in the BM tree for hunters "Beast Mastery" allows for the taming of Exotic pets. Exotic pets are much like any other pet, and needs your love and caring like any other pet. (Or just the occassional whip and dog biscuit if you're that sort of person)

Moths and Wasps will also become tameable in WotLK. These two are not exotic and will thus be available to all hunters. Mania has a nice list of all the new pet models up at Petopia. There's some pretty sweet looking stuff coming. I don't think you'll beat running around with e devilsaur very easily though.

You can compare all the pets and their abilities here on the wowhead list.

Raids

So, you may be wondering what will you end up using in raids?

* Wasps look to be pretty awesome for a raid buff : Decreases the armor of the target by 1260 for 20 sec. Which has a 6 sec cooldown and does quite decent damage as well.* Worms will get a similar ability but less value: -785 (stacks 5x).* Spore bats got a skill which does -700 to target armor.* Wolves however get Party members within 20 yards of the wolf receive an extra 5% damage to their next Physical attack. Lasts 10 sec. Which is a lot better scaling than +40 damage would have been...Update: The howl got changed to an attack power value.

That is..... If blizzard hadn't decided to change some debuff stacking. The wasp sting will not stack with the druid faery fire, acid spit (worm) won't stack with sunder armor or expose armor. So much for pet buffs being useful in raids. not.

Some of the pets get a cast speed reduction (curse of tongues), some get thunderclap, some get a snare or a slow. Each pet will have a unique ability as well as a generic focus dump that does the same damage as all the other pet focus dumps do. (Bite, smack and claw) At least hunters won't need to worry too much about utility in raids. Just get the right pet to replace another member's debuff and you're set to go. Great for PvP as well.

Also interesting to note is that pets, Instead of the previous -5% -7% +10%, all pets now only get +5% +10% to their stats. See here for old values and here for the new values. A decent improvement for most pets, especially in terms of armor and health.

DPS?

I'm not certain whether the pet instant attacks will scale with attack power, or how much. Some might, some might not. Previously only spells such as lightning breath and poison scaled with attack power. Hopefully blizzard has found time to implement a generic damage increase to pet abilities across the board. I can only speculate right now though, perhaps someone else will be able to shed some light into that matter?

From what I see though the main contenders for highest dps pets would be:* Wasps. If you have no druid or warlock in the group. -Attack power is always quite powerful, and the wasp has a low 6 sec cooldown on it's special where most other pets have 10 seconds or more. The wasp also has a +10% base damage modifier.* Devilsaurs. Also blessed with a nice +10% damage modifier, and a self buff which stacks up to three times. Allowing an additional +9% total extra damage for itself. Self buffs are good for soloing, but generally less wanted for raids.* Wolves. These may be a pretty strong contender, depending if you can get your hunter into a melee group or someplace where your entire group will benefit from the attack power buff. Other hunters will do great since you'd also buff their pets. Again, a 10% base damage modifier for the wolf itself.

Other than that most pets have gotten their utility abilities nerfed or changed in such a way that you'd probably be best not bringing them to a raid by default unless your raid is very unbalanced. Or more likely, you're going out for some PvP!

Unlike regular servers, blizzard tends to update the PTR at rather odd times. At least from a European point of view.

Those "few weeks" in which we were said to receive the 3.0.2 patch on the live servers appears to be turning into more than a few weeks, and is more likely going to be a month and a bit at the current rate.

WotLK Build 8905 is up

In this build Naxxramas has been opened and a lot of items are available for viewing. The 10 man ilvl seems to be 200 with loot from Kel'thuzzad being at ilvl 213, whereas the 25 man version of Naxx seems to have ilvl 213 as a base. Not much else is available from the 25 man Naxx yet as it's not fully itemized yet.

Some of the armor sets are also available. Keep in mind these are beta and still unfinished. But it appears that blizzard is reusing the original (recolored) Naxx models. You can find the stats for the Rogue set and others over at MMOC and WoR. Wowhead doesn't seem to have picked up the items yet.

Other changes

Further class changes including the poorly designed rogue combat tree as was announced earlier, are now available on the PTR.

Two new rogue glyphs:

Glyph of Pick Lock - Reduces the cast time of your Pick Lock ability by 75%.

The WotLK wiki will likely have the full list up soonish. If not then WoWWiki probably will.

Future changes

Racials. Indeed, some of your racials are getting changed, and some races will receive extra racials.

Trolls for instance (/woo!) are getting a 15% reduction in snare effects upon them. Where Orcs previously had a 15% stun resistance, they now have a 15% reduction in the stun duration upon them.

All the flat resistances for all races are being changes to a 1-3% chance for spells of that type to miss. Undead are getting the lower end of that stick with only 1% against shadow type spells.

As you might have feared, the Tauren health bonus is being scaled down a bit as well.

The human racial "perception" is being nerfed as well. (Rogues and druids rejoice!) Instead of an activated +10 stealth detection level, all humans now have a passive +1 stealth level detection. This should be a lot more in line with the other races.

It's uncertain whether any other racials (such as the +1 crit on ranged weapons for trolls and dwarves) will get changed as well. Time shall tell.

I was wondering, what's the highest level dungeon you expect to have cleared before the 3.0.2 patch starts? KZ, SSC, TK, BT, Sunwell? Let us know. It's a multiple choice this time so hopefully you get to do a lot of clicking :P

No, I wasn't calling anyone any names, though I might as well be. Blizzard is actually adding dummies to the game. Not a new version of the target dummy, but actual "NPCs" much like you see the orcs beating in Hellfire Citadel.

These have been requested for a long time, but apparently the big blue in france just never saw a need to comply to our wishes in this regard. Until now. According to WoR there'll be some level 80 and boss level dummies for us to test our DPS on. They'll be located in the sewers of Dalaran. Odd place, but these will prove quite useful in testing some item proc chances and personal DPS. It's unlikely they'll be able to help you in your weapon training much in the same way the servants in blasted lands will no longer give you weapon skill.

Since Death Knights start at level 55, they'd have 2 Major and 2 Minor glyph slots.

More rogue changes have been announced. Some good (Precision buff) some not so good (Relentless Strikes nerf). Personally I'm not too happy with this yet, (combat is slowly being turned into shit by blizzard) there's still a lot of changes that need to be made to put rogues on par with the other class changes. Stay of execution got removed which is quite lame vs warriors as well.

Though, at least we now know that the combat tree will have the 1-2% physical damage buff for the raid which was discussed earlier. If you wish to play around with these new talent tree changes you can use this tree over at war-tools.

Some sample specs (non theorycrafted): mutilate, combat, combat hemo. The rogue talents feel very much unfinished, especially combat and the high level tiers of the other two trees. I'd even drop off some suggestion talents for blizzard, but I doubt they'd reach the test team in time for the patch.

I haven't got much time so I'll quote the entire post for your reading pleasure ;)

----Gamnin Wrote:----

Hello again,

Here’s a quick update on some additional changes we’ve made over the weekend. Most of these, but not all, will be in the next beta build.

General- Cloak of Shadows cooldown changed to 1.5 min. - Disarm Trap range increased to 20 yds, cast time reduced to 1 sec, now requires stealth. - (NEW – Level 75) Tricks of the Trade: The current party or raid member becomes the target of your Tricks of the Trade. The threat caused by your next attack and all actions taken for 6 sec afterwards will be transferred to the target. In addition, all damage caused by the target is increased by 15% during this time. 30 sec cooldown. (Surprise! :) Yes, this is the new group/raid utility ability. We haven’t put any stacking protection on it yet but we’ll need one type of solution or other to prevent the need for 5 rogue Trick rotations. Note also that you cannot use this ability on yourself.)

Assassination- Vigor moved to Tier 3. - Relentless Strikes moved to Subtlety Tier 1, made 5 ranks for 4/8/12/16/20% chance. - Murder moved to Tier 6, now increases damage by 2/4%. - (NEW – Tier 7) Overkill: Abilities used while stealthed and for 6 seconds after breaking stealth cost 10 less energy. - Focused Attacks and Turn the Tables have swapped locations. - Master Poisoner moved to Tier 9, no longer increases chance to hit with poison attacks, now increases the critical hit chance of all attacks made against any target you have poisoned by 1/2/3% and reduces the duration of all Poison effects applied to you by 17/34/50%. (This does not stack with the Paladin talent Heart of the Crusader.) - Hunger for Blood duration increased to 30 seconds.

Combat- Precision now also increases chance to hit with poison attacks by 1/2/3/4/5%. - Nerves of Steel will now reduce damage taken while stunned or feared by 15/30% rather than reducing duration. - Improved Sprint moved to Tier 4. - Blade Twisting now slows movement speed by 70%. - Mace Specialization now ignores 3/6/9/12/15% of target’s armor. - Throwing Specialization now also has a chance to interrupt target when Fan of Knives is used. - Unfair Advantage: Whenever you dodge an attack you strike back for 50/100% of your main hand weapon’s damage. - Stay of Execution removed, replaced with Blood Poisoning. - (NEW – Tier 9) Blood Poisoning: All physical damage caused to enemies you have poisoned is increased by 1/2%. - Prey on the Weak now increases critical strike damage of all attacks. - Killing Spree is the new name for Murder Spree and should be working much better very soon.

Subtlety- Shadowstep will no longer be usable while rooted. - Elusiveness moved to Tier 3, now reduces cooldown of Cloak of Shadows by 15/30 sec. - Premeditation cooldown reduced to 20 sec. - Preparation no longer refreshes the cooldown to Premeditation. - Master of Deception reduced to 3 ranks. - Opportunity reduces to 2 ranks for 10/20%. - Camouflage reduced to 3 ranks for 5/10/15% speed and 2/4/6 sec off the cooldown of Stealth. - Initiative moved to Tier 4, increased to 33/66/100% chance. - Improved Ambush moved to Tier 4, reduced to 2 ranks for 25/50%. - Serrated Blades moved to Tier 3. - Wrongfully Accused replaced with Filthy Tricks. - (NEW – Tier 9) Filthy Tricks: Reduces the cooldown of your Tricks of the Trade and Distract abilities by 5/10 sec. - Slaughter from the Shadows now also reduces the energy cost of your Hemorrhage ability by 1/2/3/4/5. - Shadow Dance redesigned, now allows the use of Sap, Garrote, Ambush, Cheap Shot, Premeditation, Pickpocket and Disarm Trap regardless of being stealthed. Those abilities all gain a cooldown of 2 sec. Lasts 10 sec.

As mentioned a couple of days ago in this post, this post is about rogue tanking.

You may be thinking, leather, barely 10k health, we're doomed for sure! Not quite. With proper gear a rogue can actually tank certain bosses. Threat and spell damage are the only real problems. Even bosses such as Mother shahraz and Illidan have successfully be tanked by rogues in the past. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) this mechanic does not work everywhere. As said threat is an issue, in full avoidance gear we have very little DPS, and thus pathetic threat. The second issue is this, sunwell radiance. It basically ensures we'd have -25% avoidance and are thus unable to continue tanking in Sunwell.

It basically comes down to this. Rogue tanking is fun, hilarious in pvp, and a nice quirk to do in case one of your other tanks gets hit by a car. But, not a reason for you to steal armor off your druids, hunters, warriors or paladins. Just keep that in mind.

How much we'll be able to do in WotLK is still fairly uncertain, however blizzard has made the statement (threat?) that we won't likely be able to continue this fun abuse of the avoidance system in the upcoming expansion.

Quote:

I can't give you exact numbers, but you are correct that Sunwell Radiance was added simply because we let tanks get crazy high avoidance. It does feel like a bit of a band-aid, but when you think about the alternative we would have needed to balance those encounters (dodge, dodge, parry, dead), lower avoidance was probably the right call.

We've learned a lot about itemization since then and certainly have no plans of going back to Sunwell Radiance. But don't expect to get 100% avoidance any time soon.

Oh well. Let's make the most out of this while we can! Either way, I intend to gather an avoidance set as my second gear set in WotLK.

Speccing

Speccing for tanking is fairly straightforward, you really don't have much choice in the matter. Subtlety is primarily the way to go due to the +15% agility talent Sinister Calling. You could go Combat spec and take 2/2 Vitality, but the 13% less agility will ensure you'll be unable to gain enough avoidance.

Something like this should do the trick: Subtlety (raids) or Combat for better threat but less avoidance (5 man dungeons). Don't take it as a holy grail of any kind though, there's always room to improve the spec based on your needs and preferences.

Stat values

Before you can give gear a value, you'll need to know how much avoidance each stat is worth. This is largely made easy by Combat Ratings.

Agility is special since this stat can be affected by our talents, blessing of kings and sayge's dark fortune. Since the darkmoon faire is only active once a month we'll skip on that last buff for now.

Agility seems to be the best choice out of the four stats. (Parry is good for threat though, but that's another story)

Avoidance Goal

So, how much avoidance do we actually need to be "un hittable"? This will vary slightly depending whether a boss is dual wielding or not as well if the boss has any special abilities which increase it's hit rating. Gurtogg Bloodboil and Illidan for instance have been changed to be counted as dual wielding mobs. Thus their base miss chance is 24% rather than 5% as most bosses. They've been given what appears to be a +19% hit chance talent however which means their normal attacks will still have a 5% miss chance but special instant attacks will have a 0% miss rate. Much like rogues.

You need 100% dodge, parry and/or avoidance in general not to be hit by mobs equal to your level. For each level that a mob/boss is a level higher than you they gain 0.6% to hit you. This is because your chance to parry, dodge and chance to be missed go down by 0.2% each. This is caused by the fact that they have 15 weaponskill more than your base defence. Their 365 vs your 350 at level 70.

Completely naked, with no talents the values below are your base agility. However, since we need to include the agility modifiers in all calculations we'll assume that blessing of kings and Sinister calling are active for the avoidance math and multiply the result by 0.06325%.

Base dodge modifier : -0.59% dodge for rogues. Most classes have a 0% modifier, but blizzard decided to be evil and give us -0.59% so we wouldn't get too high dodge. Go figure.

I'm a troll myself, so I'll use that as a base example for now. 10.12% - 0.59% = 9.53%

Gems

Gems are the cake and butter to get you up to the avoidance limit. Since it's red gems that give +10 agility you may end up with a hefty price tag. No pain, no gain as they say. Dig deep in that bundle and get the best you can get. You'll also want to ignore socket bonusses for the most part. +2 stam, +4 Crit, +2 hit or +4 AP isn't going to help your avoidance at all.

To activate this Meta gem you need 2 blue and 2 yellow gems.This can be done by simply socketing in 2 green gems and thus losing 2x 10 stats, but there are simply no viable green gems that give any avoidance at all. If there hadn't been any good orange gems this might have been a different case however. Heroic gems are no longer unique as of a recent patch so we can use the best that are available.

Meaning, you'd need to make sure you gain at least 2 agility from socket bonusses in order to make using a meta gem worthwhile. Not to mention the +3% extra damage from crits for threat. This shouldn't be too difficult I think. Unlike what some other people claim, using a meta gem can actually be beneficial for your total avoidance.

In theory it'll be easier in WotLK, since the new meta gems won't have requirements(or so I'm told). Also, jewelcrafters can make BoP gems for themselves that will fit all three sockets regardless of color to achieve extra socket bonusses without the loss of avoidance.

Avoidance socket bonus

These are suitable items for accommodating the activation of the meta gem, I think their socket bonus speaks for itself.

This list for Lootzor will show a decent collection sorted by avoidance value. And, you can always search manually using thottbot's recently added point based filtering. It's a bit clunky still though. Or even shadowpanther's list. And even this list on lootrank. Plenty of options really.

I've tried to add items for all tiers to this list, so it should be suitable for everyone.All sockets are assumed to be filled with a +10 Agi red gem, all meta sockets are assumed to be empty.

When one takes the highest available avoidance item for each slot, only skipping the alchemist trinket in favour of the scarab your total max avoidance from gear would be: 52.841303294821 The meta gem slot is still empty though.

Filling up the Meta slot

The goal is to use the minimum of 4 gems and get the most extra avoidance. As described above, doing so will mean we lose 0.884184510644 Avoidance.

Using this combination would mean we only lose 1 agility on the chest, while we gain 10 agility in socket bonusses. This should more than cover the loss of 0.125184510644 avoidance we got by swapping out 4 of the red gems.

For sunwell you'd need an extra 25% : http://thottbot.com/s45769Which is simply not possible to obtain at this time.

When patch 3.0.2 hits the live servers Scorpid sting and Insect swarm will no longer stack, thus you'll need an additional 2% Avoidance. Or rather, you'll have 2% less to spare. See this blue post for details.

Optimal setup (High threat)

To tank effectively you'll need threat, lots of it. Sadly this isn't always possible. The 2p and 4p slayer's set bonus is very good, but in order to get it you'd have to sacrifice a lot of avoidance. Also, since you don't have any combat potency the 2p set bonus is pretty lacking as well.

Changing all the max items we used earlier into the ones marked as optimal would reduce avoidance by: -9.938942076171%That will mess up the meta gem again however so you need to reduce that value by another: -0.56925%. Which causes you to end up at : -10.508192076171%

Don't forget you can also switch out the 2x20 agility for Mongoose. This means you'll lose 40*0.06325 = 2.53% Avoidance, but gain a lot of threat.

Since we had 10.930553294821 to spare, that's all good. We're losing another 2% in WotLK though, so you'll have to make some choices then. Realistically though, if you're able to ge the ones marked as optimal you shouldn't have too much difficulty skipping on 1-2 of them either and still do a lot of DPS.

Smash riposte whenever you can. Since you've got 10.x% parry and are taking a lot of blows in your general direction it should be available fairly often. A good amount of threat for very little energy is never a bad thing. Keep slice 'n dice active and rupture when the last stack drops off your target. If a boss has a cast timer for certain spells save your cloak of shadows to counter it. Onyxia's fire breath or gurtogg's acid breath for example. Since you've got max avoidance most boss enrage timers shouldn't be a problem for you. Low threat and aoe or random spells will definitely kill your raid buddies though. Never forget you need them to keep your avoidance the way it is.

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